1/3/2015 8:10 PM
I saw ‘Unbroken’ today. In a one-sentence review, it’s an amazing
lifetime story reduced, and I use that word purposely, to two hours. I’d hoped
for more of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, but that’s me. Still, worth the ticket
price, which ain’t cheap even at a matinee.
A last note on the movie. Remember, the Allies convicted and
in many cases hung Japanese officers for the way they treated prisoners,
calling the treatment ‘torture’ and ‘war crimes’. In fact, after the Korean
War, we commissioned a manual of torture survival for our soldiers,
specifically the Air Force’s SERE program. But after September 11th,
when the CIA and others, (operating out of, and with the authority of the Executive branch,) wanted a torture
program to deal with prisoners, they tasked two guys to invent a torturemanual, and these guys used that SERE manual as a reference for the kinds of
resistance the tortures needed to overcome.
So when you watch ‘Unbroken’, think of how awful that
treatment was/is, and how useless it was/is.
Three obits from December, two captains of industry worth
noting, and one amazing athlete.
William Salomon died on Dec 7, at age 100. This guy was the son of one of the founders of Salomon Brothers, a famous
investment bank. The obit in the NY Times is worth reading, but let me point
out three things. This guy worked hard at the family business, rbut only after
he graduated from high school. Know anyone on Wall Street who’s risen to
managing partner of a bank with only a high school education? Also, he retired
in the ‘80s, so he was running the bank when it was a partnership, so the partners
actually had skin in the game. A managing director he’d hired as a trainee in
1955, is quoted “In a partnership, the capital is actually your money at risk
every day. In the era of corporations, which is what the firms are now, it’s
mostly other people’s money.” In fact,
after he left, the guy he put in charge merged the firm with a corporation,
leaving Salomon feeling betrayed, having agreed to the “hope and expectation
that we would remain a general partnership for a long time.”
If only these banks had stayed partnerships. The
mortgage-backed securities would never have brought down the economy, because
these partners would have been scared to death of personally going broke.
Next, J. Robert Beyster, the founder of SAIC,
described by the AP in 2003 as “the most influential company most people have
never heard of”, died Dec. 22 at age 90. He'd started an engineering firm of advanced-degree employees,
who got stock options as well as pay. He made it an employee-owned company,
which had two interesting results. It made the employees work in a more
entrepreneurial spirit, and it meant that no one outside the company could see
the books.
Eventually, this became one of the go-to companies for
retiring Defense officials or high-ranking military officers. The kind of
company it grew into was reported in Vanity Fair back in 2007, three years after he’d left. And again, after he left, SAIC’d board
decided to go public, issued an IPO, and was no longer empoloyee-owned. As he
wrote, this move “subsequently dismantled its powerful employee-ownership
culture. The result was reduced shareholder value, and the eventual split of
SAIC into two companies…”. It also resulted in a lot of employee-millionaires,
and then moved from San Diego to Virginia, to be close to the folks they were
hiring from Washington, like so many other Defense contractors.
Finally, Bob Hall, an amazing Harlem Globetrotter, died theday before Christmas, at 87. I picked this obit for the picture. Know anyone else who can hold two
basketballs in each hand? He started playing before the NBA integrated in the ’49-’50
season. He teamed with players like Connie Hawkins and Wilt Chamberlain, who
went on to the NBA. (Actually, there’s no one like Wilt the Stilt. But he was a
Globetrotter before he went to Philadelphia Warriors.) The team even played the
national team on a tour of the Soviet Union in 1959. It’s all just a great read.
And after the first two heavy-hitters in their industries, a person who made a career of
making ordinary folks smile is worth noting.
Monarch update: three more came out today. Release ‘em tomorrow.one
last caterpillar still eating, and the rest are getting ready, already pupa, or…the
three butterflies I mentioned already.
Hope you’re enjoying the weekend.
1/3/2015 9:17 PM
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